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Mimi Gregoire Carpenter
Watercolors

Mimi Gregoire Carpenter’s watercolors remind you to look down while walking at the water’s edge. “People travel the world collecting shells without realizing what’s here in Maine,” she says. At Goose Rocks Beach, Carpenter finds a rainbow of biodiversity. “There are creatures in colors so vivid that when I paint, I tone them down because otherwise people don’t believe they’re real.” She collects Irish moss, a seaweed that shifts seasonally from hot pink or dark red to green and yellow. She finds green sea sponges, starfish, driftwood, mollusks, periwinkles, and razor clams. In her studio, she arranges them in layered Victorian squares, still-life studies, or solo portraits.

Sea creatures have personalities, like characters in a play, says Carpenter. Beachcombing cojures up stories of pirates and red-headed mermaids. She works in opaque watercolor, a layering technique that uses a dry palette and a skinny brush with barely any water. She favors the two nontraditional watercolor effects—black paint adds a three-dimensional feel; creatures spill off her canvas onto the mat, perhaps returning to the sea.

Mimi Gregoire Carpenter, Cape Porpoise, Maine
207 284–7021 | bchcmb@gwi.net
Mimi Gregoire Carpenter’s Studio Gallery
www.artistsofmaine.com | Pricing: Giclée prints $100–$500 (framed) Original watercolors $300–$6,000 (framed)

 

Evening Skyline Old Gloucester

Evening Skyline Old Gloucester
Dennis Poirier
Plein Air Paintings

Dennis Poirier, a native of Gloucester, Massachusetts, is indebted to the tradition of the great American impressionist painters who preceded him on Cape Ann. The work of Winslow Homer, Fitz Hugh Lane, John Singer Sargent, Don Stone, and others, instilled in him a passion for plein air painting, that is, painting in the open air. Like them, he is inspired by the coastal light as it bounces off water and boats, by the play of shadow and sunshine on snow-covered hills. “Painting on location is worth more than working from a thousand photographs,” he says. There is beauty in even the wettest weather, even if it forces him to paint beneath a tarp or in the comfort of his car.

Lately Poirier has been fascinated by painting at night, under street lights or bathed by the glow from a lighted restaurant. “Shapes, design and values registering as dark and light are as important as color,” says Poirier. “Realistic painting at its most root level is very abstract yet well designed. A beautiful impressionist painting converted to black and white is still beautiful.”

 

Dennis Poirier Studio/Gallery
33 Wells Street, North Berwick, Maine
207 676–9959 www.dennispoirierstudio.com
(open by appointment or chance) | Pricing: $950
(8” x 10”) to $10,000 (36” x 36”)–framed

 

Farm, Hills and Field, France

Farm, Hills and Field, France
Connie Hayes
Oil Painter

Connie Hayes captures what others see all the time but perhaps don’t see at all. Her paintings in rich colors transport us to places that are familiar yet brand new, authentic yet abstract. They are “Borrowed Views” of other peoples’ favorite rooms, fields, and quiet roads in coastal Maine, urban landscapes of Portland, Maine and New York City, and a country farm in Normandy, France. Homeowners hand her their keys while they are away. For an undisturbed week or more, she explores their homes and surroundings. She takes her time, sketching, and making notes. “When my hands begin to twitch and I see something as if it’s already painted, that’s when I know this is my subject,” says Hayes, who has painted on location for decades but now brings the sketchbook to her studio to develop additional paintings. “I forget I’m really painting a pickup truck. I let go of the edges. I am engrossed in the light beneath the truck and the light beneath the tires. I forget about the names of objects. What I’m really saying to myself is ‘dusty purple bumps into vibrant blue; tips over red dot; spills onto yellow plane which bumps into murky, white vertical and then up and over large, slanty blue.’ But I’ve stopped naming the objects and started to think in the language of paint.”

There is a strong sense of place in all of Hayes’s work, not only in her paintings of Maine—for which she is best known. Three years ago, a French woman vacationing in Cushing, Maine, visited the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland during an exhibit of Hayes’s paintings. Captivated, she contacted the artist, ultimately inviting her to paint her family’s farm in the French countryside. For three weeks, Connie Hayes “borrowed” the farm, relishing the rustic improvements made by the couple and their children, who had restored their home by hand. She wandered its apple orchards, barnyard, and gardens of peonies, poppies, and heavily scented roses. On exhibit at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art this summer, Hayes’ Normandy landscapes and interiors depict the playfulness and passions of her hosts’ lives. Six women’s hats rest on a windowsill for summer afternoons outdoors. Twenty pairs of children’s rubber boots, in many sizes, are lined up for visitors in mud season. The family is whimsical but also practical, and honors tradition.

“Every place has a different flavor, a different culture,” says Hayes. “The way they arrange buildings and the plantings around them creates shapes that I translate by repetition of forms. I don’t need a charming place as subject matter, although people often think I do, because my interest lies in putting color together in ways I haven’t seen or done before. Where previously I painted a sampling of subjects in one place, that’s now changing. I’m moving in the direction of playing with one subject many ways, reducing and filtering the details until I can translate its essence onto the canvas.” 

 

Connie Hayes, Rockland, Maine
www.conniehayes.com | Pricing $3,000 to more than $50,000 for oil paintings.
$800 to $2,000 for giclée prints
Paintings available in Southern Maine: George Marshall Store Gallery
York Harbor, Maine 207 351–1083 www.georgemarshallstoregallery.org